An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (review)

Through its power of exclusive jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, the United States Congress, for better or worse, has made Washington a laboratory for federal policy throughout its history. Scarcely mentioned in Eric Foner’s landmark 1988 examination of Reconstruction, Washington has long awaited full examination in this pivotal period in American history. In An Example for All the Land, Kate Masur has provided a study worthy of the subject. Deeply researched and compellingly argued, Masur’s book provides new insight not just into the contested policy for securing new freedoms but also into the underlying effort to redefine democratic practice.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, Masur’s primary focus is on the struggle for equality, a rich subject for examination during a time when custom and culture limited the rights of all manner of Americans, including women, but also immigrants and others who were regularly denied full participation in the new republic. This corporate social order understood people less as individuals than as members of different and overlapping groups organized hierarchically within the community.

When Senator Charles Sumner declared he would make Washington “an example for the land,” he had in mind extending a host of new rights to freedpeople. Initially this vision was constrained by the prevailing corporate view, which remained pervasive even in the Freedmen’s Bureau’s intent to “uplift” freedpeople and among Washington’s educated black establishment, who, contending through the refinement of their speech and dress, proclaimed that they were worthy participants in the democratic experiment. But while respectability worked to elites’ advantage in seeking admission to congressional galleries and capital streetcars, black activists were not content simply to fit in; they defined a more expansive view of equality and argued forcefully for “upstart rights,” such as full access to public accommodations and integrated schools.

The rhetoric of freedom that bubbled up from activists and permeated the language of Radical Republicanism heightened expectations among women that they also would be elevated to full citizenship. Their cause faltered, however, as Radical Republicans rejected their petitions by drawing on the older corporate view that women were already sufficiently represented through the male heads of their households. And whereas many activists rejected that position, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony embraced it, using it to argue that their superior status made their enfranchisement a necessary counterweight to the votes of ignorant African American and immigrant men.

The older and more restrictive view of equality emerged again as black success in postwar politics generated a backlash. The great majority of Washington’s white residents fervently opposed extending the franchise, even though the expanded electorate put in place public improvements long overdue in the capital city. So when congressional Republicans acted despite their wishes, they organized not just as Democrats overtly demonizing black political influence but also more subtly through established civic organizations, most notably the board of trade. Their success in getting Congress to substitute a territorial government under an appointed governor for the locally elected bodies that had governed the cities of Washington and Georgetown allowed for the concentration of power to promote needed physical improvements for the city, even as it limited the franchise. When this change proved insufficient to conservatives determined to curb the role of African Americans in government, Congress acted again. Citing the need for greater efficiencies, it eliminated elected government in Washington entirely in 1874 in favor of a federally appointed commission, an arrangement that limited access to public accommodations as well as the franchise for nearly 100 years.

Although Masur understates the broad appeal that the promise of a regular federal payment had in return for eliminating representative government, she is quite right to link congressional action not just with the end of Reconstruction but also to the rejection of the expansive definition of equality established in Washington. Under the guise...